My Top 1000 Songs #855: Whatever

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

This is around the 1750th post I've made to this site over the past few years... and the very first appearance of Oasis. Seems weird. But I'm kinda Oasis-agnostic. I didn't listen to them much back in the day (or much of 90s Britpop, period). I eventually circled back to them a few years ago, and decided I didn't like their big records nearly as much as they were hyped at the time (though they're not bad); but enjoyed some of their largely-disparaged later records a lot more than I expected to. I tend to view them as a band with a solid 80-minute greatest hits CDR in them, and the balance of their material being... perfectly decent.

But if I'm gonna have some Oasis in my Top 1000 songs list, I may as well go big. "Whatever" was a 1994 single that didn't find itself on a proper album, which is weird, as it seems a lot more worthy than most of what did. I never really got the Oasis-Beatles comparisons, with the exception of this track, which unapologetically cribs the "All You Need Is Love" orchestration and bombast. And it's derivative in other ways as well, borrowing the basic melody from Bonzo Dog Band/Monty Python/Rutles wunderkind Neil Innes' "How Sweet To Be An Idiot," the title track from his 1973 solo debut--Innes ended up suing and getting a songwriting credit & royalties.

Still, whomever gets the credit, it remains a great song. Big and brash and over the top baroque pop.

Live on tv:

Neil Innes, "How Sweet To Be An Idiot":